The Cultural and Institutional Barrier of Knowledge Exchanges in the Development of Open Source Software

Abstract

Open source software (OSS) gives developing countries inexpensive or free alternatives to proprietary software. It gives them the opportunity to develop software and software industry without starting from scratch. This chapter discusses the diffusion and development of OSS in Indonesia especially after the government took “Indonesia, Go Open Source” (IGOS) initiative. This initiative united government organizations, communities, R&D institutions, and universities. While the government's concern was to tackle piracy by replacing illegal software with OSS, the others sought to develop their own OSS. However, the openness of their software is only in terms of that they were developed using OSS development tools, while their mode of development remained closed, which was caused by cultural barrier and institutional incompatibility between government's regime of project administration and the governance of OSS development.